Is being nice making you a bad boss?
And something about Game of Thrones
It’s always better to hire nice people.
Extreme low agreeableness, in other words, being a narcissistic jerk, doesn’t work within most organizations. You could summarize this recruiting rule of thumb as “don’t hire a**holes.”
I’ve seen, however, organizations where being a jerk is the norm, and you know what?
Some are very successful. But these organizations don’t win “Best Places to Work” awards.
What’s the right dose of agreeableness?
Highly agreeable people tend to be averse to conflict. They’re more likely to be empathetic, flexible, and altruistic. However, two of the most critical leadership qualities are being comfortable with making people uncomfortable and understanding that you can’t always agree with everybody.
In business, agreeableness has its downsides. You’re really not a leader if all you’re doing is building consensus and trying to make everybody happy. You can’t make everybody happy! A leader must make decisions between competing priorities and competing advice. And sometimes, your decisions will be optimal for the business, but they’ll create winners and losers. You may even have to fire people.
In my role as a leader, I must strike a balance between recognizing the limitations of agreeableness and the need to maintain team support, while also having the courage to make unpopular yet necessary decisions.
In bad companies, leaders can be unpopular with their employees yet survive for a very long time. As long as the team delivers good results and the leader is good at managing up, no one at the top seems to care or even notice that the leader is a tyrant to those below them.
In good companies, the kiss of death for a senior leader is to lose their team’s support. Strong organizations evaluate how teams rate their bosses through a formal review process. Good companies don’t tolerate bad leadership for too long.
This can be a risk for senior leaders who want to make a splash in their first few months and achieve early wins. To do so, new leaders think they must break eggs, i.e., disagree with the current way of doing things. After all, companies hire leaders from the outside to drive change. But new leaders who break too many eggs fail.
The number one job of a new senior leader in their first year won’t be to hit some Key Performance Indicators. It will be to build productive relationships with peers, their teams, and senior management.
The bottom line is that agreeableness is a desirable trait in a leader. Getting along helps with collaboration.
When in doubt, be agreeable. Be more like Keanu Reeves, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, and less like Joffrey Baratheon (you definitely don’t want to be like Joffrey), and Logan Roy.
Speaking of Joffrey Baratheon, the most-hated character from the popular show Game of Thrones, his innate disagreeableness made him ineffective as King. His clever—yet equally evil—grandfather, Tywin Lannister, gets to the crux of the matter in the following dialogue. Joffrey says to a member of his council:
“I am the King! And I will punish you!”
To which his wise grandfather responds:
“Any man who must say ‘I am the King’ is no true king.”
Have you ever found yourself saying “I am the boss” (or something equivalent) during a disagreement at work?
I’m going to guess that when you did, you had already lost the argument.
I’ll concede that sometimes, a reminder of your formal authority is needed, but rarely.
Importantly, someone who’s always disagreeable, like Joffrey, ends up with less influence than someone who’s rarely disagreeable yet can show teeth occasionally. Every leader must be able to lean towards the opposite side of agreeableness.
Leaders who are too agreeable aren’t effective when tough decisions need to be made.
They will be seen as pushovers, and people will take advantage of them. There are some advantages to calculated disagreeableness. Sometimes, you must be disagreeable to be an effective leader.
So how often should you be disagreeable?
I believe that to be an effective leader, you must be disagreeable about 10% of the time.
Learn to pick your battles.
When he decided to write a book on leadership and self-improvement, Sébastien Page was rejected by over 200 literary agents.
He was asked, “Why would a finance expert write about leadership?” He was told to stay in his lane.
Sébastien has more than two decades of leadership experience. As an author, he believes breakthroughs often happen when experts venture outside their field. That is why, in "The Psychology of Leadership," he went beyond finance and economics to study research in psychology.
He is currently Head of Global Multi-Asset and Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price. He oversees a team of investment professionals actively managing over $500 billion in assets under management.
Sébastien won research paper awards from The Journal of Portfolio Management in 2003, 2010, 2011, and 2022 and the Financial Analysts Journal in 2010 and 2014. In addition to The Psychology of Leadership, he is the author of Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation (McGraw Hill, 2020) and the coauthor of Factor Investing and Asset Allocation (CFA Institute Research Foundation, 2016).
Sébastien is also a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Portfolio Management and the Financial Analysts Journal, and the Board of Directors of the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance (Q Group). He regularly appears in the media, including Bloomberg TV and CNBC, and was recently named amongst the 15 Top Voices in Finance by LinkedIn.